r, as it would have been had he been in command of it. The
article professed to be a review of Borrow's "Sleeping Bard," and was in
fact by Borrow himself. He had achieved the supreme honour of reviewing
his own work, and, as it fell out, he persuaded the public to buy every
copy. Very few were found to buy "Wild Wales," notwithstanding. The
first edition of a thousand copies lasted three years; the second, of
three thousand, lasted twenty-three years. Borrow was ridiculed for
informing his readers that he paid his bill at a Welsh inn, without
mentioning the amount. He was praised for having written "the first
clever book . . . in which an honest attempt is made to do justice to the
Welsh literature," for knowing far more than most educated Welshmen about
that literature, and for describing his travels and encounters "with much
of the freshness, humour and geniality of his earlier days," for writing
in fact "the best book about Wales ever published."

Certainly no later book which could be compared with it has been as good,
or nearly as good. As for its predecessors, the "Itinerary" and the
"Description" of Gerald of Wales, even setting aside the charm of
antiquity, make a book that is equal to "Wild Wales" for originality,
vivacity and truth. Of the antiquarian and picturesque travellers in the
late eighteenth century and early nineteenth none wrote anything that is
valuable except for some facts and some evidence of taste. Borrow
himself probably knew few or none of them, though he mentions Gerald.
There is no evidence that he knew the great nineteenth-century
collections of Welsh manuscripts and translations. He says nothing of
the "Mabinogion." He had apparently never heard of the pedestrian Iolo
Morganwg. He perhaps never saw Stephens' "Literature of the Kymry." His
knowledge was picked up anyhow and anywhere from Welsh texts and Lhuyd's
"Archaeologia," without system and with very little friendly discussion
or comparison. Wales, therefore, was to him as wonderful as Spain, and
equally uncharted. What he saw did not spoil the visionary image, and
his enthusiasm coupled with curiosity gives the book of his travels just
the continuous impulse which he never found for his Cornish, Manx, Irish
or Scottish notes. He was able to fill the book with sympathetic
observation and genial self-revelation.

The book is of course a tourist's book. Borrow went through the country
as a gentleman, running no risks,